THE HEART OF A MAN

Another in the Simenon series of clinical probes, this explores the great Maugin, of the theatre and moving picture public as his somewhat disreputable past catches up with his doomed future, Warned by heart specialist Biguet that at 59 he must slow down, Magin trien to establish a new kind of life with his third wife, Alice, and their daughter, who is not his. With the memories of his other two wives, and all the women he has known, by his bastard son and the death of his wife, Maugin retires to the Mediterranean where the simple life soon becomes complex and Maugin again runs away -- back to Paris. And there he dies in a last, drab fling. A dissection that is precise in both medical and emotional pathology, this is overlaid with the spectre of death and despair rather than the previous theme of murder.